Chapter 16. Glossaries

The DocBook XSL stylesheets have some special features for glossaries. In addition to formatting glossary elements and their glossentrys, they let you form cross references from your text to glossary entries and create a separate glossary database.

Glossary formatting

These formatting options are available for both HTML and print output.

The title and start of a glossary is considered a glossary title page. It can be controlled by the same title page customization methods as other components, and described in Chapter 10, Title page customization.

You can divide a glossary into sections using glossdiv wrappers around groups of glossentry elements. You must give each glossdiv a title.

If your glossentry elements include an abbrev or acronym element, then you can control how it appears with the glossentry.show.acronym parameter. Its values can be:

primary

Put the abbrev or acronym first, followed by the glossterm in parentheses.

yes

Put the glossterm first, followed by the abbrev or acronym in parentheses.

no

Don't show the abbrev or acronym at all.

If your entry has both abbrev and acronym, then both will appear in the output.

Glossary formatting in print

In addition to the above features, the print stylesheet supports these additional formatting features.

You can format a glossary as a list with the terms to the left of the indented definition paragraphs, or as blocks with each term stacked above its unindented paragraph. By default, a glossary is formatted as a list. If you want to change all of your glossaries to format as blocks, set the glossary.as.blocks stylesheet parameter to a nonzero value. If you are
using a glosslist instead of a
glossary element, then use the glosslist.as.blocksparameter instead. You can also control how
an individual glossary is presented by using a processing instruction
inserted into that glossary
element in your document. Here is an example:

You can set the value to list to format one glossary as a list when the parameter formats the rest as blocks. For a glosslist, the processing instruction name is glosslist-presentation, and it takes the same values. In all cases, the processing instruction overrides the stylesheet parameter for an individual glossary.

If your glossary is formatted as a list, you can control the indent of the definition paragraphs to allow space for the terms. The glossterm.widthstylesheet parameter sets the indent for all
glossary and
glosslist elements. Its default
value is 2in. You can also set the indent width for an
individual glossary using a processing instruction, as in this
example.

For a glossary formatted as a list, you can also control the minimum size of the space separating the term from the paragraph. That value is controlled by the glossterm.separation parameter, and its default value is 0.25in. There is no processing instruction for this
feature.